The 10s ~
Ancestry, misfortune,
burdens, family
Pentacles ~ It’s all about a familial connection through the element of Earth and
unapologetic materialism. It’s about the
mundane everyday gritty
things that make this group of people cohesive.
Family,
inheritance, wills, survivors, ancestry, ties, loyalties, relationships
10/Pentacles ~ It’s all about how
you fit into the family dynamics, or don’t.
It’s all about what you’re going to get out of this connection; and lots
of times this is shamelessly all about money, property, and the demon called material
gain. Other times it’s more about
loyalty and how all of the players in this scenario, The Family, fit together,
and who’s loyal to whom, and who will sell you out, and who’s paired off –
either for good or evil – with whom.
There is nothing more dramatic, climactic, or totally intriguing than
family connections and how it all comes together. A better cast for a more flamboyant drama
could not have been cast by Hollywood.
Reversed:
This definitely isn’t going well. Often this card reversed has implied that my client
was an outsider among his family, tolerated at best, left totally out of the
will at its worst. It represents a total
disconnection, or bungled communication, or estrangement, or down right
hostility. Whatever it’s implying, it
sucks.
My Personal Connection:
Oh my, where do I start? This card personifies my ex-husband’s family
(and I have more than one Ex, so I’m not publicly targeting a specific
family). They were wealthy. They were consumed with the idea of money, in
who’s going to get it and who’s not.
They were also paranoid about outsiders coming in to the family,
concerned that everyone was out to get their money. They were at war within their own group over
money, business deals, cut-throat tactics among themselves, not to mention
favoritism among the siblings and their wealthy parents. The most appalling aspect of the ten of
pentacles for me is the fact that the parents used money to manipulate and
control their grown children. They used
it ruthlessly.
This card (and my association with this family)
were so traumatic and so impressionable that I will probably never
totally come to peace with my experience or this card. I can actually feel their negative group
energy emanating from it.
Did I learn anything from this experience and
the ten of pentacles? Yes. I learned that having money does not
necessarily lead to happiness, it often has just the opposite destructive
effect. I learned that there’s all kinds
of detrimental emotional and mental effects that may go with wealth. I learned that all having money does is
remove the anxiety over not having money.
Swords
~ Its
all about life (and certain individuals in it) catching us off guard. Its all about a sucker punch, either from the
universe, or through a human connection.
Gossip,
lies, misfortune, back-stabbing, illness, surgery, death
10/Swords ~ The saddest thing about this card,
when the fatal blow comes from human hands or lips, is that our illusion of
friendship or love is instantly shattered, never to return to it’s rosy former
state. The sense of betrayal is so thick
you can taste it, and if this is your first unfortunate experience with it, it
will be very bitter indeed. The figure
on this card looks so solitary, but you need to understand that just out of the
frame there stands all the individuals who could have sounded an alarm,
individuals who could have come forward to support you and affirm your good
character, individuals who were either two-faced or intimidated. Whether this difficult and somewhat tragic set
of circumstances takes place among a group of friends, the workplace, school,
or within a relationship, it is devastating, and the after-effects can last a
lifetime.
Reversed:
Check your health. Often this indicates that problems lay, not
with humanity and it’s petty loyalties, but with the body and Destiny’s fate.
My Personal Connection:The ten of swords is an impressionable
dramatic card, there’s no getting away from that. My personal connection with this card and its
energy was developed quite early with the idea of female friendships and
loyalty. Her name was Debbie S., and we
met in high school. I took her
friendship and her loyalty for granted, thinking it was an endless boundless
infinite state of being, until she showed up with my soon-to-be ex-husband for
a divorce hearing, arm in arm, making sure he felt her support and
sympathy. The ten of swords is quite
appropriate in it’s usually shocking appearance in most tarot decks. It’s energy can leave you blind-sided,
open-mouthed in disbelief, and it can quite quickly make mince-meat of your naïve and trusting nature.
The thing about it is, we don’t all learn the
lesson this card is trying so hard to teach us right off the bat. So you may find that you will have many such
disturbing scenarios in life until you finally get the message the universe is
trying to send you. When that clicks,
you will realize how important it is to set boundaries, to protect your space,
your physicality, and your spirituality.
You will discover that you have to protect yourself from
the energy of this devastating card and its consequences. If you can’t learn to do this, you will have
a repetition of negative events.
Wands ~ Its all about
carrying the burden of the world on your shoulders, whether real or imagined. It’s about a workaholic; its about tunnel
vision and not being able to realize when its okay to slow down or stop and
smell the roses.
Responsibility, burn
out, duty, single-mindedness, tunnel vision, stubbornness, strength,
determination, blindness to reality
10/Wands ~ The energy of this card and all that
it implies is exhausting. Either
someone, by necessity, has to work their ass off to the extreme just to survive
and thrive, or they believe that they must.
This card also showcases the individual who has suddenly been dumped
upon with a ton of responsibility that maybe isn’t there’s to claim in the
first place. It also exposes someone so
obsessed with work, along with an inflated idea of responsibility, money, and
achievement that they are missing out on the most important things in life.
Reversed:
Put the burdens down, or the universe will
take them from your hands in a none too gentle manner. Pass the buck, it’s someone elses turn to don
the title of Work Horse. Get your head
out of your ass and watch where you’re going.
You’re either straying off course all on your own, or someone is
misdirecting you, either intentionally or not.
My Personal Connection:
This card is all about responsibility. It’s forcing us to look at how we embrace it,
or how we neglect it. This card
represents the burdens that go along with life, all of those things that are so
varied among us and yet so similar.
Sometimes these burdens are welcome and deliberately taken on with gusto
and enthusiasm. And sometimes these
burdens are thrust upon us by the universe with no warning and no time for
preparation. Either way, when the ten of
pentacles shows up, this weight we carry is high-lighted. It becomes a focus for the reading, for the
card, and it’s telling us that we may need a break from this weight, we might
need some down time, we might need to examine our life and see if we really
need to be carrying all this responsibility by ourselves, or are we enabling
someone elses irresponsibility.
Cups
~ It’s
all about happy endings and getting a glimpse of Snow White or Cinderella after
she and her prince set up house. It’s a
desired outcome. It’s all
yippity-skippity with positive energy.
Happiness,
family, success, emotional fulfillment, Leave it to Beaver, The Brady Bunch,
cloying sweetness
10/Cups ~ Happiness is pretty much a life goal for every human being on the planet,
even though some of us haven’t really thought about it, or may not have even
decided what exactly would make us all yippety-skippety happy for the rest of
our lives. And do you know why I feel
the transitory energy of this card? It’s
because happiness, pure ecstatic joy, cannot be maintained. We would be drowning in endorphins. The best that we can do is to have goals that
enable us to reach levels of happiness for a certain period of time; and when this state begins to
wane, we move on to new goals and new horizons to bring us another dose of
happiness. I believe this is called
Life. Celebrate this card when it comes
up for you. It means that you’re in a
happy state right now. Don't take it for
granted.
Reversed:
Oops, you may be at a low ebb. You need to start thinking about what you
need to change or do in life to find happiness.
What’s making you unhappy at this moment? Is it something that is within your power to
change? Yes? Then you’d better get moving on this. Be thankful that the state you’re in right
now is temporary, it’s just one of the natural ebb and flow energies of Life.
Personal Connection:
My life, as everyone elses, is punctuated
with happy moments, happy circumstances, happy situations, happy relationships,
happy energy. The key word is punctuated. In-between all that happy energy is all the
other energy, not as positive maybe, but just as intense and sometimes in a
strange way enjoyable. The valleys make
the peaks more memorable and fascinating.
Think of all the unhappy times in your
life. What were you experiencing? How was it affecting other areas of your
life? What did you do to move on from
it? What did you learn from it? Did you ever want to experience it
again? (Odd question, but you’d be
surprised by a lot of the answers).
There’s a certain complacency and snobbery in
the ten of pentacles. Sometimes this
card reminds me of the beautiful perfect blonde smug cheerleader. They’re a little bit better than the rest of
us, or so they think. They’re lives seem
set like perfect pictures in a glossy magazine, or so they appear. This is the ten of cups. Sometimes it’s so sickeningly sweet, it makes
you gag.
Source:
The Ultimate Tarot Guide:
for Your Personal Tarot Journey
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